Serena noticed that Liza didn’t say “our father” like Maggie had in her note. She tried not to let it bother her and took a lighter tone. “Maybe they plan on re-creating this room there, like Julia Child’s kitchen at the Smithsonian. You should give them the couch and the chairs for the reading room. That would add a mystique to the library.” As soon as she said it, she regretted it. She didn’t have enough of a relationship with Liza to suggest such a thing. Plus, she wanted the wingback chairs for herself, if offered.

But Liza surprised her. “That’s a fantastic idea, Serena. None of us want these things, but I bet Pequot would. They could attach small plaques that say, ‘William Sweeney Sat Here.’ Actually, it wasn’t until after my mother died that my father spent much time in here at all. He preferred reading out in the boathouse when we were little. It was quieter.” There was a pause, and the two women, the two sisters, took in the moment.

“It’s a lovely room,” Serena said, still holding the tray of coffees.

“Kitchen’s this way.”

Tricia looked down at her phone. Liza’s text said that Serena was in the kitchen and wanted a tour. Oh, and she had brought lattes for all. Then she had added several emojis of the panicked cat face imitating The Scream, presumably to indicate her personal panic, but Tricia knew that she would welcome Serena graciously. Liza had grown into politeness, any rebelliousness worn down after years of Jones family training and her own position in town as a business owner and arbiter of taste. Liza could no more be unwelcoming to Serena than she could to those tourists who wandered into the gallery, more interested in the whereabouts of a public bathroom than a watercolor.

Tricia felt the need to oversee any touring about the property. Though the pressure was mounting to find that memoir, she was more worried about what Serena might write than what her father did write. She’d successfully pushed thoughts of Serena out of her head for a few days, but now she was back, standing in the kitchen and demanding a tour.

She looked over at Raj, who was carefully flipping through Dispatches, a book on the Vietnam War that her father had used to research Bitter Fruit.

Even as a writer, her father had never felt like the physical books were sacred items, meant to be kept pristine and perfect. Bill Sweeney commandeered books, underlining, writing in the margins, tearing out pages if necessary. “I own it,” he used to say by way of explanation. “It’s mine.”

Dispatches was one of those books and Raj was taking photos of certain pages that looked particularly hard-worn. Someday, a doctoral student in literature would use the notes William Sweeney wrote in the margins as the basis of a doctoral thesis about major novels on the Vietnam War, including Bitter Fruit. Raj had told Tricia that his job was to make sure all the pieces were in place for that to happen.

“I’m headed to the house for a bit. Do you need anything?” Raj had settled into the boathouse with a few belongings, his computers and gear and his bike. In a few short days, Raj and Tricia had established an easy working rhythm. Like two diligent high school students working together on a research project, they were shy with each other, trying to keep the focus on the work at hand and ignoring the obvious mutual attraction. They worked side by side for about five or six hours a day, mainly Raj asking questions and Tricia guiding him through the contents of the office. Then she’d go for a long run and spend the evening wondering what Raj was doing in the boathouse loft and if he was only laughing at her jokes or catching her eye at various times throughout the day because she was Bill Sweeney’s daughter. Or was it because he felt like she felt? Like something was happening between them.

Tricia felt foolish; there were so many other pressing issues at hand and she was distracted by some guy. She knew in a few days she’d be done searching every possible nook and cranny for the thumb drive and would have to move her efforts into the house—the attic, her father’s bedroom, the library. But she wasn’t ready to leave Raj yet. His presence was something she couldn’t describe, at once familiar and exotic. She wasn’t used to being off-kilter around a man.

In fact, in the previous relationships she’d had—including the college boyfriend, the guy in law school, and the ill-advised fling with the client—

the major draw was that she was exactly on kilter, comfortable to a fault.

“Wow, that sounds sexy,” Maggie had once said when Tricia described her relationship with Steve, the guy from law school, “like dating a good fleece jacket.”

Even with Blair Wynan, her client and a man she should not have been seeing, the tenor of the relationship hadn’t been the frantic forbidden love portrayed on TV dramas where the female lawyers wore lace bras under their silk blouses, ready for action in the middle of a depo. Despite the twenty-year age difference, she and Blair shared similar academic credentials, athletic backgrounds, even lived on the same Upper East Side block. Had he not been a client, had Tricia not gotten pregnant, the two of them might have moved toward marriage. The second for him, of course.

But when she discovered she was pregnant, thanks to his vasectomy failure, a gulf opened up between them.

Tricia, who was meticulous about birth control, was furious at his cavalier attitude about the pregnancy and equally disappointed in his lack of compassion over the miscarriage. Even though she was terrified of the professional repercussions of a child so early in her career, a fact she was later ashamed of, she expected some sort of understanding from Blair. He was relieved, thrilled actually, when she lost the baby at nine weeks.

(“Phew. Dodged a bullet!” were his exact words when she called him from the gynecologist’s office.) When Tricia ended the relationship, he thanked her for her sacrifice with a straight face.

Tricia hadn’t been involved with anyone in the years since or even mentioned the miscarriage, except to her doctor. She wanted to power through on her own and she thought she’d handled it well, having no idea that Liza and Maggie’s back-channel communications often revolved around Tricia’s verbal shortness and exasperated tone of voice.

But now, in the wake of tremendous loss and upheaval, Tricia found herself attracted to this accidental officemate and she was thrown.

“Hey, Raj . . .” Tricia said again because she loved saying his name. “Did you hear me?”

“I didn’t.”

“I’m headed up to the house to talk to a . . . journalist.” That seemed like the safest description. As she had learned from the hundreds of hours listening to true crime podcasts while walking to work, when you’re lying, it’s best to stick as close to the truth as you can. “Can I get you anything?”

“No, thank you. I’ll make some tea here in a bit. Where’s he from?”

“The journalist? It’s a she,” Tricia corrected. “She’s from nowhere.

Freelance, fishing around for a story.”

“Ah, my mistake. Is there one?”

“One what?”

“A story to tell. Beyond the missing memoir.”

“I think there might be. But I’m not sure who the protagonist is yet.”

Immediately, Tricia was struck by the familiarity of the scene: two sisters, sitting across the kitchen table drinking coffee and eating Entenmann’s while the sun streamed through the big picture windows. The Sweeney sisters had spent hundreds of hours at the old butcher block table tucked in the cozy corner of the kitchen playing games, doing homework, drinking coffee, drinking tea, and eventually drinking wine. Talking, laughing,

crying, complaining about their parents, their boyfriends, their schoolwork, and their bosses. The night their mother died, Julia fixed them all hot chocolate while they sat, dazed and devasted. Maggie even fell asleep at the table that night, simply putting her head down and closing her eyes. It felt like their whole life had unfolded at that kitchen table and now, Serena sat with Liza, sharing a moment.

“Welcome to Willow Lane.” Tricia had decided to emulate her big sisters and be as warm to Serena as she could muster. Kill with kindness was her new motto, and by kill, she meant kill any possible tell-all that Serena might be planning. As Tricia had discussed with Cap, she was frustrated about splitting the estate with another person mainly because there wasn’t much of an estate to cash in on. But, in truth, Not Much Left divided by four Sweeney sisters wasn’t significantly less money than Not Much Left divided by three Sweeney sisters. Still, it wasn’t easy for her to be warm.

“Oh, that’s right, you were here at the wake. And Halloween. Well, welcome back. And technically, you do own a quarter of it now, so you should have a look at the place.”